The app economy flourished in 2014. Continued growth and new app trends surfaced and the industry saw many new apps climb and fall in popularity and usage throughout the year.

Using Mobidia's global set of app metrics, informed by millions of real users around the world and covering millions of Android and iOS apps, we have created an app insights guide. This guide features Q4 Android and iOS app and game leaderboards across 9 countries, and highlights some gaming and social messaging insights such as how app penetration in apps such as Line and WhatsApp compare across different countries.

Mobidia and Ovum have released a new report that offers insights into 2014 LTE and Wi-Fi usage trends from an extended analysis of the top LTE markets worldwide.

In just six years since its release, LTE has become one of the fastest-growing mobile technologies in history, with half a billion global subscribers expected this year. Mobidia’s latest analysis of LTE subscribers reveals a continued positive impact for the hundreds of mobile operators that have invested in LTE technology, and subscribers clearly value these faster speeds. In fact, LTE subscribers continue to use more cellular data and buy larger data plans. However, many also continue to purchase plans that are much larger than needed to cover their monthly usage.

This new report uncovers many different trends including the fact that iOS and Android smartphone users surpassed the 10 GB per user per month mark in December 2014 in terms of both Wi-Fi and cellular usage, consuming on average 10.9 GB and 10.3 GB respectively.

The below chart shows Global, cellular device users, average monthly data use across cellular and Wi- Fi between January 2014 and December 2014

As everyone gears up for the Chinese New Year people will be loading their phones up with new games to keep them occupied over the holiday period. Last year China saw an increase in the number of active users of popular games such as Candy Crush Saga. This year it looks like Clash of the Clans will be the popular choice as we see the average screen time per user climbing to over 21 hours amongst Chinese users while Candy Crush sits at just under 6 hours.

The Academy Awards ceremony, taking place on February 22nd is quickly approaching. Who will be the big winner? With more movies being watched on mobile, we were curious which video apps are the big winners. Our data highlights that Netflix and Amazon Instant Video users are generally more engaged with a much higher average app screen time compared to other competitors such as Crackle, Vudu and Hulu.

Although Amazon beat Netflix in terms of average time spent in the app in February last year, Netflix has now taken back the lead with users spending on average 4 hours and 48 minutes in the app, compared to Amazon users at 3 hours and 02 minutes. Hulu was a close third, while Crackle, Vudu and Hulu users remained flat throughout 2014.

Valentine’s Day is meant to be a day for romance, however for many it seems to result in stress. Flowers are overpriced and all the good restaurants are booked. However Apps like Zomato and Yelp are available to help make finding (and booking) the perfect restaurant easy! With the click of a button you can easily find the top rated restaurants in a given location, read reviews and book without even leaving the app. It would appear many users took advantage of these apps last year which was highlighted by the slight increase we saw in the number of sessions per user in Zomato, Yelp and Urbanspoon in February 2014. It will be interesting to see if those who ended up at McDonalds for Valentine's Day learnt from their mistakes and turn to some of these apps for a helping hand this year. So far January 2015 data is showing a lift in the number of sessions per user for OpenTable and Urbanspoon, however Zomato and Yelp remained relatively flat in January.